 | The VI century Basilica of San Vitale in Ravenna is a unique example of Byzantine art and culture. In recent times an important conservation project has restored the basilica’s mosaic wall decorations to their full glory. Livia Alberti was one of the leaders of the restoration team. |
 | Robert Arnold looks back at Italian director Ermanno Olmi's masterpiece "The Tree of Wooden Clogs" (L'Albero degli Zoccoli), winner of 14 awards including the Palme d'Or for Best film at Cannes in 1978 and the César Award in the same year for Best Foreign Film. |
 | "The Way of the World" is a 1950s travelogue of a trip that Nicolas Bouvier and Thierry Vernet took from Geneva to the Khyber Pass in their faithful FIAT Topolino. Bouvier’s account is now famous amongst travel literature lovers and is generally considered to be the best travel book ever written. |
 | Steam baths are well-known in many European countries, but maybe only in Russia is the steam-bathing “banya” tradition such a subject of national pride and an attribute of Russianness, and rightly so. |
 | The Orthodox Church is filling a political void left by the collapse of the party system in Russia. Kirill I, the Patriarch of Moscow, is forging stronger links with the Kremlin, attacking what he ominously describes as "anti-Russian" behaviour, including homosexual propaganda, the all-female pop group "Pussy Riot" and even more bizarrely the works of Lenin. |
 | Returning to China after several years absence, Olga Jazzarelli describes the dramatic changes in China's social, cultural and physical landscapes as she tours the Shanxi and Sichuan provinces. |
 | Yemen has a unique architectural heritage.
The master builders and craftsmen have learnt how to build to suit geography, location, the climate and available materials. |
 | Corey Robin's new book "The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin" traces the history of conservatism from a "counter-revolutionary" force during the French Revolution up until the current disarray in the American Republican party. |
 | With the advent of internet, short fiction has come into its own - encapsulating as it does two essential prerequisites for Web success: brevity and entertainment. TGD publishes six of Iranian-born Mitra Hooshiar’s micro-stories. The art form itself is nothing new: Aesop’s Fables for example date from the time of Ancient Greece - perhaps even earlier. |
 | When the festivities for the 1000 Year Founding of Hanoi were being planned, the Goethe Institute commissioned a new Music Theatre piece for the occasion, to be performed in the Vietnamese capital’s Opera House. Director Beverly Blankenship spent three months in Hanoi preparing and staging the ambitious new piece based on the myth of Parzival. These are her letters home. |
 | Three brothers from Palestine, all playing the "oud", make up Le Trio Joubran. Wissam Joubran talks to The Global Dispatches about their recent film soundtrack, their work with the legendary poet Mahmoud Darwish and the plight of the Palestinian people. |
 | The veteran Middle East journalist talks to The Global Dispatches about his new book "Beware of Small States". A history of Lebanon and the Middle East, from the end of Ottoman rule to the Hizbullah and Hamas wars of today. |
 | It’s one of the most-loved of all British films. It’s almost certainly the most-quoted one. And its popularity has never been greater. So why have so many people never heard of it? |
 | The history of the Annunciation and its iconography in Early Christian Art |
 | Yemen-based writer Tim Mackintosh-Smith talks to TGD about Landfalls, the third and final volume of a trilogy describing his journeys round the world in the footsteps of the inveterate 14th century Moroccan traveller Ibn Battutah. |
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